Book Review: "A Little Learning" by Evelyn Waugh

You can check out some of my other reviews of Evelyn Waugh's books below. These aren't all of them, but perhaps you'd be interested in checking them out:

Evelyn Waugh is a classic example of a person who was a great writer but perhaps not the best human being. No, he didn't do anything illegal but he did have some opinions that leaned a little too conservative for my liking. We can agree to disagree though because he did write Brideshead Revisited which is one of my favourite novels of all time (apologies to Kendall Defoe, really sorry mate but I love that book so much). A Little Learning is what seems like the first volume of an autobiography. I have to say, I don't know much about Waugh's attempt to write an autobiography but I do know that we have to prepare ourselves to read the works he wrote later in his life because they can come across as weird and rambling. This can be said about A Little Learning, but in many ways it tells us the story of Waugh's education. It's not his best work but I did enjoy it.

We first get a taste of Waugh's family, looking at them as if we are walking through a hallway filled with portraits of the people who shaped his life and identity. Yes they're upper-middle class and yes, this is the age of the decline of the aristocracy, but Waugh doesn't hold back on making them important in this story. His close relatives are definitely the ones more responsible for who he becomes but that doesn't mean that there aren't some eccentric figures within. He has a comfortable childhood therefore and writes about being raised in a household which is cultured and serene, led by his father - Arthur. Arthur was a literary critic and a publisher and so, we can see a direct connection between the way he was and the way his son turned out. I'm not going to lie, though I don't agree with the politics this family inhabits, it definitely seems quite nice and rich with culture and history - you can definitely see the 'Englishness' that Waugh tries to make his characters embody in his books.

We move on to his school days and see him grow as an intellectual figure though his brother, Alec, was responsible for a bit of a school scandal (I won't say what because you have to read the book and find out). But, we also see Evelyn Waugh begin to think for himself and form his own identity. This is something different to the kind of person he comes back to being in his later years, especially whilst writing his book Helena. He starts to question his faith and become more and more disillusioned with social stratosphere of the time. Of course, this isn't the Evelyn Waugh we are so familiar with and that is what makes it so interesting. He has not always been a staunch conservative and if you've read his early novels then you'd see that pushing through though, to read it coming from his own hand about his own life is something else entirely. As we move to Oxford University, we start to see the atmosphere of the book Brideshead Revisited and this was perhaps my favourite part for obvious reasons.

He read history at Hertford College, Oxford in the early 1920s. Like the character of Sebastian rather than that of Charles Ryder, his time there was marked by heavy drinking and artistic creativity, mixing with the bigger social circles in the high places rather than simply keeping his head down and doing his studies. He makes deep friendships in the Bright Young Things generation including the writer Cyril Connolly. I always love it when I read about writers making friends: Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and of course, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. We can see influences mix and spread across these friendship and when we learn Waugh was also friends with Anthony Powell, this makes even more sense. Waugh would leave Oxford without his degree properly done with lots of debt and apparently as directionless as Byron on his ship. Just go with it and it'll work out in the end, I guess.

There's so much more fun to be had in this book and no, it isn't amazingly written but it is so interesting and immersive. If you've loved Waugh's best fiction then there isn't a reason why you won't love this book too...

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